Climate alarmists hope that Hurricane Sandy and President Obama's re-election will coerce panicky congressional Republicans into a "carbon tax" deal in 2013. But simple math shows the tax would have no effect other than an inflationary one.

A carbon tax would operate as a new sales tax on goods and services that are produced through or otherwise involve the burning of fossil fuels. You might pay the tax in your electric bill, at the gas pump or in the form of higher prices for other good and services.

The purpose of a carbon tax would be to penalize fossil fuel use in hopes of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which have been hypothesized to cause global cooling (1970s), global warming (1980s-1990s), climate change (2000s) and extreme weather (2010s).

While higher prices for goods and services aren't inherently evil, their merits must be judged by what consumers and society get in return. So let's consider a carbon tax from a climatic perspective.

To give a carbon tax the maximum advantage in our analysis, we'll assume that it would be totally successful in reducing U.S. carbon emissions — i.e., the U.S. emits no carbon dioxide whatsoever from fossil fuels. And let's also imagine that this public policy wonder has this magical effect as of Jan. 1, 2013.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.”

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.

He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable

However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far”….”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has conducted air pollution experiments on live human subjects that discredit its claims that fine particulate matter kills people.

JunkScience.com obtained the explosive and heretofore undisclosed results through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and reveal them here for the first time.
Introduction.

Last September, JunkScience.com broke the news that EPA researchers had reported in Environmental Health Perspectives the case study of a woman who allegedly suffered atrial fibrillation after being exposed to concentrated airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in an experimental setting.

After disposing of the EPA’s effort to link the woman’s atrial fibrillation with her exposure to PM2.5, we commented:

It’s also worth asking whether this is the only study subject that the EPA has studied. Are there others? What were their results? Do we only get to hear about the one result that could possibly be twisted to fit the EPA agenda?

To answer this question, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency to see if we could get answers those questions.

Though I write to defend the natural gas industry from the junk science hurled at it and the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), I do so with mixed emotions.

Two recent government reports, one from the United Kingdom and the other from Oklahoma, have tried to draw a connection between fracking and seismic activity occurring in those areas. In the UK, the seismic activity registered 3 on the Richter scale (vibrations similar to a passing truck). In Oklahoma, the activity registered between 1.0 and 2.8. Neither report could attribute with any certainty the seismic activity to the local fracking, as that would be nearly impossible to do given the multifactorial nature of seismic activity.

So: of the more than one million fracking or fracking-like operations that have occurred, unattributable seismic activity has been detected twice. Moreover, no structural damage was attributed to any of the seismic activity.

Scientifically and from a risk management perspective, fracking should be off the hook. But of course it’s not, because radical environmentalists loathe fracking — cheap natural gas means that the world won’t be giving up fossil fuels anytime soon — and so they have their long knives out for it. You can safely bet that anytime seismic activity coincides with fracking activity, they will use that coincidence to whip up fear.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to “provide strong empirical support for the assertion that anthropogenic climate change is now a major threat to global biodiversity”… just don’t ask for an example.

The study authors claim to have reviewed 1,120 relevant studies published since 2005, extracting data from 74 of them. They report that:

Mean extinction probability across studies making predictions of the future effects of climate change was 7% by 2100 compared with 15% based on observed responses. After taking account of possible bias in the type of climate change impact analyzed and the parts of the world and taxa studied, there was less discrepancy between the two approaches: predictions suggested a mean extinction probability of 10% across taxa and regions, whereas empirical evidence gave a mean probability of 14%.

In a bizarre Memorial Day editorial, the Washington Post criticized climate skeptics for using the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents concerning Climategater Michael Mann from the University of Virginia.

The Post labeled the skeptics’ FOIA efforts as “harrassing” and “nuisance tactics.”

The Post, however, has been entirely silent on Greenpeace’s efforts to FOIA documents from the University of Virginia concerning Pat Michaels, University of Delaware concerning David Legates and from Harvard University concerning Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas — efforts that are truly “harrassing” and “nuisance” in nature as Greenpeace acted entirely in retaliation to the FOIA request concerning Mann.

The editorial is especially gross coming on the day when America commemorates those who died to preserve everyone’s freedoms — not just those of the politically correct.

» How much "Man Made" CO2 Is In The Earth's Atmosphere?
I think ALL of the CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere is from man.
I'm not sure how much "Man Made" CO2 is in the Earth's Atmosphere.
There is .04% CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere and of that "Man" has added an extra 4% (1 part in 62,500)